Thursday, 3 July 2014

Political thrillers and I by Andreas Norman

Todays guest blog is by debut author Andreas Norman who worked for the Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs for ten years on security issues and counter-terrorism. A published poet he currently works for the Swedish Embassy in Vilnius.

I like
political thrillers, because they never provide neat solutions.There is no resolution, no way out.There is seldom a murder to be solved,
justice to be handed out, order to be restored.There are systems at work, bureaucracies, powers that will continue to
move towards their pre-planned objectives, and then there are men and women of
flesh and blood, full of ideas and emotions, who seldom prevail in any real
sense.Political thrillers are essentially
tragedies.And tragedy, I believe,
offers the pleasure of reflecting upon what it means to be human, today, like
all good reads do.

The
political thriller, as a genre, is in this sense very modern.For me, it provided the tools to tell a story
about people who spend their days in offices, who deal with the complexity of
vast organizations, moving through the same modern, urban landscapes as you and
I.At its most fundamental level, I
think political thrillers are stories about the tension between huge systems
and the individual.Between the Goliath of
global corporations, spy agencies, and ministries, and the David, who is you
and I.The genre offers such rich
opportunities to tell a story with a grand panorama, stretching from global
politics to the most intimate feelings and thoughts of men and women trying to
manoeuvre in these vast systems.

My main
aim with Into A Raging Blaze was to
involve the reader emotionally and morally and create a sense of vertigo.So I needed real humans in the story, characters
to believe in and take sides with.People
who lie and betray others and even more often themselves, people burdened by
too many secrets, who endure the dull pain of acting against their own personal
beliefs in order to do their duty as a professional.The genre, I think, demands this complexity
and I love it.That's why I write, to
create characters that are alive, complex, struggling with fundamental issues.In Into
A Raging Blaze, I chose to write about two women: Bente Jensen, a security
service veteran and Carina Dymek, a junior diplomat, stuck in a mess.They develop into two people fighting a macho
environment, struggling in their very different ways to "do the right
thing", trying to find the truth and ending up fighting for their lives.Even though these are perhaps extreme
predicaments, we can nevertheless relate to them.

I love
books such as The Human Factor by
Graham Greene, John le Carré’s The
Perfect Spy or Harold Pinter's play Betrayal.In any of these works, you can’t really point
out a character and say: that’s a good guy, or that’s the bad one.With Into
A Raging Blaze, and even more its upcoming sequel The Silent War, I try to create characters that are neither simply
good, nor completely bad, but rather both at the same time.For me, as a writer, it’s a glorious moment when
I manage to bring to life a character that moves back and forth along such an
ethical continuum, who is likeable and nasty at the same time, does unethical
things but still evokes sympathy.Political
thrillers, like any good literature, have the potential to portray the struggle
of modern man to reconcile such inner tensions.Without ever coming close to the greatness of Greene and Pinter, I think
I can say that my character Bente Jensen in Into
A Raging Blaze has this interesting ambivalence.

When I
started out writing, I had no idea where I was heading.After years in the Foreign Service,

I just
longed to tell everyone about the absurd and often fascinating, seldom
glamorous and often very strange life of a diplomat.I wanted to offer the reader a peak into the
closed realms of foreign and clandestine services, and I wanted to tell a story
that conveyed the sense of vertigo I felt as a counter-terrorism officer, as I
moved close to the edges of ethical abysses.I wanted to write something ”real”, something far removed from the
clichés of James Bond, something not too witty, but rather, frank and
disturbing.I wrote in the evening, after
work, and at the weekend.The political
thriller quickly proved to be the obvious genre.

I remember
going to Rabat in Spring 2007, as a Counter-terrorism unit officer accompanying
my boss.We met with the US Embassy in
Morocco, discussed the usual subjects on regional terrorism in the vast desert
areas of the Sahel, worrying signs of al-Qaida moving about in west Africa, and
so on.It was a typical bilateral business
meeting, with Sweden as a minor but helpful partner in the global war on
terrorism.During the meeting I realised
that the American deputy sitting next to the US Ambassador was most probably
not the Head of Consular Section he had presented himself as, but a CIA officer.I never asked him, of course, and he never
told me.But the way this man analysed
specific leaders among the groups affiliated to al-Qaida, revealed him as far
too knowledgeable about counter-terrorism for an ordinary consular guy.And it struck me: this is what I should write
about.The tension of such moments, the secrecy,
the layers of disingenuousness, the on-going surveillance, the gritty violence
of counter-terrorism operations and the polite conversations of diplomats: there
was my story, hiding in plain sight.

Into A Raging Blaze is published by Quercus on 3 July, hardback, £12.99.